With digital compression technology, it is possible to carry many television channels in the spectrum space of a single analog channel. Because of this, more television channels are transmitted over the same spectrum, and there are more channels for viewers to watch. Digitally compressed video and audio signals are binary data streams that can be transmitted, stored and played out as computer data files or streams. Therefore, digital video/audio data are typically handled in digital forms during production, transmission and storage phases.
Most of the video content in television broadcast, cable broadcast and on the internet originates in digital formats. Most of the content is already produced and stored in digital storage devices before it is distributed to consumers. For the purpose of managing advertising activities and marketing campaigns, government regulation enforcement, market research, and broadcasting signal monitoring, there is a need to continuously monitor the video signals as they are distributed to viewers.
In prior art, the operator may be given a video clip and be asked to search through the archived recordings to see where and when the video clip has shown up in video distributions in the past. In other words, the operator may be asked to search through the archived recordings to seek video content that is visually identical to the given video clip. For example, advertisers may want to determine if a particular commercial video has been distributed properly over the last year in certain geographic areas, so that they can track the effectiveness of their advertising campaign.
There are several problems with the above. The first problem is the fact that video content typically consumes massive amount of storage capacity. For example, a single channel of television content broadcast for 24 hours would consume at least 10 GB. For the purpose of monitoring thousands of television channels for a year or more, the storage capacity requirement can easily get into the Petabyte (1 PB=1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) ranges.
The other problem is that even if the content is saved in storage systems, the cost to maintain, search and archive the content data can be too expensive for most users. This cost is reflected in terms of storage, computation and network hardware systems needed to perform the tasks. In many scenarios, the information to be archived and searched is not on the specific content itself, but more specifically related to when and where the content is distributed. This information can be valuable for content owners, marketers and relevant government regulators to track the coverage of specific video content. The purpose of this invention is to provide a method to facilitate this capability.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a method for facilitating the archiving and search of video content without a huge storage capacity required, and to be able to search the information easily at low hardware cost. There is also a need to collect statistics and extraction additional information from the archived video information automatically.